Gilead just rips off a formulation developed at university, gets a patent in the US, and starts uber charging for development they never paid for, IOW ripping us off. I hate that.

Quote:

In February, Doctors of the World filed a patent challenge in Europe against Sovaldi (sofosbuvir), arguing that “the molecule itself is not sufficiently innovative.”

They are claiming that Gilead merely copied their publicly funded research, patented it, and then spiked the price to reap insane profits. And reap insane profits, they did. In 2014, Gilead reported a total revenue of $24.9 billion as compared to the previous year’s $11.2 billion.

How much of difference does it make? A lot of difference, that's how much. A LOT!

Quote:

To contrast the extremely expensive treatment situation in the United States, we can look at India. In 2015, the Indian government denied Gilead a monopoly due to their inability to prove that the drug was more effective than the drug invented at Cardiff University in 2007.

Because they have no state-granted monopoly, Gilead has to compete in a free market in India. Competitors, of which there a many, using the older, much cheaper, and equally effective drug, have driven the price down to a mere $4 a pill. This makes total cost to cure your Hepatitis C in India’s free market $336. Compare that to the United State’s market controlled price of $84,000, and the situation becomes infuriating.

Corporate welfare at it's best, and no one will ever be punished. White collar crime, the legal kind of crime.

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant

Yeah fuck you frothy screaming "silent majority."
We see you totally avoiding your shitty life to scream at others because just like children it's easier to blame someone else so you can pretend you're still a good person who hasn't fucked everything up than deal with your own shit.

I'm incredibly annoyed and dismayed with some of my fellow Jeopardy! watchers. Today (Friday, 1/8) among their contestants there was a woman who may or may not have been trans. I'm happy to say that the question didn't even occur to me until I came to a site for viewers of the show and the comments section was filled with anti-trans bigotry. Admittedly, these people weren't regular commenters and among the regulars there were people telling the bigots to get fucked, but all the same it's a depressing irruption of small-minded transphobia into what has almost always otherwise been a nice and friendly world.

I heard about that. A friend of mine was on Jeopardy a few months back (the one people were comparing to Louise Belcher), and she mentioned this on Facebook today.

Last year, I met my goal of eliminating all of my debt. After retirement contributions, I used as much of my income as possible for that purpose. My bank tells me my credit score every quarter. Last October, my score was over 800. Shortly after it was pulled, I paid off my car (about 3 years early). It updated today, and I got dinged 50 points, presumably because that was my last line of installment credit. The interest rate on my car loan was so low that there was no real reason to pay it off other than not to have to figure that payment into my budget every month. Had I known how much I would get punished for carrying less debt, I wouldn't even have bothered

Aside from proudly outlining a practice that amounts to a kind of junior debtor’s prison, the letter informs us that the regular (non-isolated) meal at Michaela is known as ‘family lunch’, a horrifying detail which reminds us of how the most impersonal, authoritarian institutions are also the most likely to masquerade as an extension of the safe and the domestic: just think of Tories likening the government budget to a ‘household budget’. This is your family, and you just wait until your father gets home.

Quote:

It was set up a couple of years ago under the leadership of headmistress Katharine Birbalsingh, a Tory darling notable for being practically the only teacher in Britain to come out in favour of Michael Gove’s notoriously harebrained educational reform schemes. She also writes trashy chick-lit under the name *squints* Katharine Bing (yeah, me neither). The fact that Birbalsingh read French and Philosophy at university leads me to believe that her school’s choice of motto – “Knowledge is Power” – can only be meant as a cruel swipe at the memory of Michel Foucault, who once wrote, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resembles prisons?”

This thread hasn't gotten any posts in a while, which is surprising given how many hate-worthy things have been happening.

Well yes, except that this thread is the one for random hatefulness. The present surge in hateful things is hardly random. They pretty much all come from one source and fit under the same well-established heading.

As if killing off City of Heroes back in 2012 wasn’t bad enough, now NCsoft takes one of the dead superhero MMO’s most beloved characters, Statesman, and pits him against characters from more successful games, less cancelled games as the latest champion in PC MOBA Master X Master.

Homage is nice. A nod now and then would be great. Making Statesman, once the proud face of City of Heroes, fight in an arena against a collection of original creations and characters from Blade and Soul, WildStar, Guild Wars 2 and Lineage verges on insulting.

I’m not saying Master X Master (MXM) isn’t a good game. I’ve not had a chance to play it, so I couldn’t say. It’s just sad to see Statesman alone so far from his Paragon City home. He should be surrounded by colorful player-created characters with horrible names, not fighting for our amusement in some sort of contest of champions.

I'm in the bathroom at work and look down to make sure everything is still there and I'm not missing. Lo and behold, there's gum in the urinal. Seriously. How gross and inconsiderate do people really have to be. Someone will have to remove that you know; just because you couldn't bother to toss it in the trash near the door on the way in.

It would almost be worth the process of sanitizing my hand to bring it to the offending person and toss it on their desk. "Hey, you left this in the bathroom." I decided it wasn't worth the effort to ask around for the owner.

Sure, I've seen worse things in a public bathroom, but this seemed so pointless and it's worse knowing I'm working with the person who did it.

__________________
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for the night. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm the rest of his life.

Thunderbird One has this "camera detector" that sets off an alarm whenever the craft comes into range of a camera. This way pilot Scott Tracy can fly away or destroy the camera to prevent the ship from ever being filmed.

So how the hell were they able to make Thunderbirds in the first place? Thunderbird One should have destroyed all of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's cameras in the beginning of the first episode!

Long story short, the companies that own and operate Mandalay Bay want a declaratory judgment holding that some 2002 federal statute I'd never heard of immunizes them from tort liability for last October's mass killing.

The article describes the many, many defendants in the lawsuit as "victims" of the shooting, but all right-thinking people know that the real victims are the companies that own and operate Mandalay Bay.

The lawyers listed on the caption of that complaint all need to be staked to the ground and beaten vigorously about the crotch with canoe paddles.

__________________"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis